A segregated society

Peter Preston spoiled his article (The limits of peace politics, 4 April) by referring to the "RUC" (Corrections, 5 April). The reality is that 10 years of positive discrimination have transformed the composition of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which in itself represents, for the first time in 90 years, an endorsement by the whole community to policing Northern Ireland. Where he does make a valid point is that policing is one of the few public areas which shows real progress in creating shared spaces or institutions. A few months ago I was stunned to hear a well-respected BBC correspondent hosting a World Service event at Stormont expressing her surprise that education was still largely segregated, public housing is still divided by religion, so-called "peace walls" have increased since 1998 and so on. She thought that the top-down Good Friday agreement had "solved" the Northern Ireland crisis. Fundamentally, Northern Ireland remains a divided society. The real task facing the executive after the May elections will be to begin to shift the entrenched patterns of segregation. Peter Robinson's call for an end to segregated education is a good marker for what needs to be done.